Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts

Monday, September 28, 2015

Telling Yarns - The Germ of Art and Producer Ciara Nic Chormaic

 
Narrator: Europeans who had flocked to 19th Century Chicago for jobs crouched together for survival. They created ethnic enclaves little Germanys, Italy's, Warsaws, and Pragues, glowering at each other with suspicion
Douglas Bukowski, Writer: I think the best way to look at late 19th century Chicago is to think of it as a great boxing ring by the lake. People just didn't get along here. Nobody who was Polish wanted to have an Irish priest. Nobody who was Irish wanted to go to a German church. This whole notion of tolerance for other groups was foreign to people who didn't know any other groups in the old country. from PBS American Experience Series: Chicago in the 19th Century

I had the great pleasure to attend the opening night of Mike Houlihan's Irish American Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Center in heart of the Loop.

I explained the etymology of the Loop to film maker Dave McLaughlin and his wife Mary Beth as we walked from the Siskel Center to The Emerald Loop for the post viewing party.

I pointed above us to the roaring CTA elevated trains  above Lake and State.   The Loop is elevated track fencing much of the Dan Burnham and Louis Sullivan 19th century architecture that once housed capitalists, so detested by PBS and their 501(c) 3 foundation beneficiaries that funding was provided to re-write history.  That is not how stories, yarns, legends and history work . . .except on Public Television, Radio and at Media Matters.

People have been telling yarns and even paint cave walls when words failed them.

The Irish American Film Festival presented Deach An Dorais ( What;s Your Poison?) a documentary based on the Bronx legend of Mike Malloy, the Rasputin of the Bronx, a 1933 alcoholic who just would not die.  Mike Malloy survived more than twenty attempts by four creeps who wanted to cash-in on insurance policies take out in the homeless derelict with no known relatives or friend.  All Mike had going for him was an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and an iron constitution.  He survived poisonings, methonal guzzlings, glass, nail and contaminated sardine and oysters swallowings, freezings in sub-zero temperatures, while soaked with booze and buckets of ice cold water and even a speeding automobile driven over his body.

The story was told by Bronx residents and made it's way into plays, 1950's radio stories like Johnny Dollar -Insurance Investigator and,  most recently, picked up and printed by Smithsonian Magazine and made its way east over the Atlantic on the BBC.

Stories are rooted in human interactions.

Lions, chimps and whales don't tell stories, no matter what PBS tells us.

Story-telling is the germ of art.

When we arrived at The Emerald Loop the stories weaved up a storm.  Irish American News columnists and television producer Mike Morley told of Martin Hogan The Fenian Hero who escaped an Australian Penal Colony on the The Catalpa only to be buried without ceremony at Chicago's Mount Olivet Cemetery, James Sheahan told of Constable James Quinn, the first Chicago cop to be killed in the line of duty and author Rick Barrett's long work to set the record straight.

I had asked a the producer of  DEOCH AN DORAIS, Ms. Ciara Nic Chomaic if she had gathered information from New York's greatest story teller, T.J. English, author of Paddy Whacked.  Ciara had reached out to Mr. English, but he was unavailable.
Producer Ciara Nic Chormaic (center)
You see, Ms. Nic Chormaic build the stories around any given story.  She had attached the undertakers, the academics, the genealogists, the artists, a NYPD detective, GAA Hard Man Anthony Molloy ( the film's narrator) and the wildly entertaining and brilliant criminal pathologist who really stole the film for me.

The director Paddy Hayes and Ms. Nic Chromaic created art from a story.

However it was Ciara Nic Chromaic who vetted the story tellers made the narrative handled by Mr. Hayes possible.

History is a fabric of yarns, sagas. songs and stories - Art.

PBS, Ken Burns, Oliver Stone do propaganda.

I like Art.









Friday, January 27, 2012

Google Adsense Subtracts Catholics - Obama Counts on It.


In Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), the $22-billion-a-year online-advertising Goliath, Obama appears to have found a corporate kindred spirit. Google executives, led by CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are scary smart and supremely self-confident (much like the President himself), and despite their company's growing power, they depict themselves as advocates for consumers.

"What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down," Obama told Google employees during a 2007 visit to its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Money.CNN.com

Google refused to allow advertisements on a Catholic Blog because Catholic was 'negative and pornographic.' Photos of Our Lady? Saints?

Can this be merely a coincidence? I have been using Google Blogger for a few years, as a writing pad. My penmanship, once rather nice, thanks to the Sisters of Mercy, deteriorated through decades of teaching, which requires the signing of quick-notes that began in 1975Please admit Gabriel Horn to 6th period, as he was enjoying full, rich flavor of Virginia tobacco in the second floor men's room, he should have been much more industrious and gone into the faculty men's room near the boiler room which goes unoccupied, until Sherwood changes the oil on # 3 bus, takes the Kankakee Daily Journal in with him and occupies that august currule chair until school dismissal. Thank You Hickey, English. and devolved to G.Horn >6th> PFH( indiscernible as a Doctor's note).

I write, as has been my practice, each and every morning. I don't get paid - I don't do ads.

Most Bloggers pick up candy and smokes money by offering Ads -on Google via AdSENSE.

The information highway offers more than communication and information. It is the Sears Roebuck of the World. It is also Slippery Dan's House of Knockers and Rumps.

Pornography has been with us since paleolithic man* smeared stuff on cave walls. Art is often pornographic and intrusively offensive like the Mapplethorpe and his disciples, which always manage to find cave space at the Guggenheim. I am an unsophisticated man.

I like Dogs Playing Poker and Pool, but I appreciate the contributions made to Art by people of Faith -Cimabue, Raphael, Giotto, Tintoretto & etc.

Art is always political and so, it seems is Google. I read this in Chicago Now of the Chicago Tribune.

A few days ago I put in an application to Google AdSense to be on my blog. What that means is there would be an ad on my blog, and if you click on that ad, I would get paid a little bit. I don't get paid now, so I thought it might be worth a shot.

I waited patiently as other bloggers got approved within hours in some cases or days. I finally contacted them and this was the response I got:


"Your ads are not serving to your site is because we have noticed you have
negative or pornographic content. Please remove this content and allow 48
hours for ads to begin serving. If you believe that your site has been
flagged incorrectly please let me know.
The Good Folks at Google

The blogger continued -
I've been writing this blog since November of 2010. I've never used a swear word in the headline. I've never put up an inappropriate picture. I have, however, written about being Catholic and what that has meant to me, my family and friends.

I have written about abortion and the scandal within our Church involving sexual misconduct by our priests. I wrote about my great niece making her First Communion and I've written about our choir's struggles to find another parish after our Pastor forced us out. I've written about the new translation and a myriad of other topics related to my Catholic faith.

Potentially negative, non-family safe or offensive to their advertisers? It that's the case, I have two words for Google AdSense and they are not God bless.

Filed under: Catholic, Religion

Nevertheless, I found this on Google -

“Fear Factor” producers’ plans to serve fresh glasses of donkey semen to contestants on the next episode had NBC execs so concerned … they gave serious thought to killing the stunt, TMZ has learned.
Sources involved in the production tell us the stomach-churning stunt was shot last summer — but NBC honchos were having a tough time swallowing this one as the air date approached.
We’re told the challenge involved teams of twins drinking the full glass of donkey semen — with a glass of urine thrown in for good measure. Contestants had to drain both glasses in order to move on to the next round.
Our sources say NBC execs had multiple pow-wows in the months after the stunt was shot … but eventually gave FF producers the thumbs up.
Calls to NBC were not immediately returned.
The episode airs this coming Monday — and yes, we’re told multiple contestants actually do (gulp) drink up.


Like I said, I am no sophisticate - De Gustibus Non Est Disputanum. I have yet to see Fear Factor, Jersey Shore, Kardshian Anything, Hard Core Porn of any kind.

Google cites Catholic Blog content as negative and pornographic. President Obama finds Catholics and the Catholic Faith equally as offensive and is on the offensive in support of Planned Parenthood and Gay Marriage. I am glad I take no Google coin - more so now.


What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down - Take down Catholics and the rest is easy.




http://www.ghanamma.com/2012/01/fear-factor-donkey-semen-makes-nbc-question-taste/

*
The cave man used the tools he found at hand. His pigments were ochre and manganese and iron dug from the earth and mixed with animal fat. Or charcoal, perhaps left from the same fires which burned to light the darkness of his cave. His canvas was the walls, floors and ceilings of his cavern home, often in large seemingly communal chambers, often in the deepest most difficult to access recesses. Occasionally he used stone or flint tools to engrave or carve a bas- relief. He sometimes employed the natural variation in the surface of the walls to achieve a three dimensional effect.

His subject? The things he knew best; the animals upon which he depended for food and clothing - his very existence. Those same animals which could mean danger and death. There are bison, deer, mammoth, ibex and wooly rhinoceros. Fish and horses and bear. He painted and he engraved single figures, animals in pairs, whole compositions. He overlapped lines or superimposed new figures over those of an earlier time or age. He painted too, human figures: male, female, anthropomorphic figures more crudely rendered than animals. He sometimes used his own hand as a stencil. Most intriguing of all he painted signs. Non- representational forms, repeated over and over in never-ending variation. These have been variously interpreted as sexual symbols, counting methods, architectural structures, lunar variations or depiction of plant life.

His style? A sense of freeness, a flowing, often sensitive line. An ease of composition. A oneness with his work. This early man, working by the light of charcoal fires or crude oil lamps often in the deepest, darkest recesses of his cave, produced an art form which seldom has been equaled to this day. A universal style - for similar drawing and identical themes are found in caves many hundreds of miles apart - symbols which continued, little changed, for 10,000 years.



http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/21/technology/obama_google.fortune/

Monday, June 15, 2009

Stanley Crouch Beats on the Haters and Bigots - Anti-Semites Never See People.


Stanley Crouch, jazz critic, musician, historian, essayist and gentleman sacks the bigots.

Hate is real, because haters live in a fantasy world where people are merely the background to 'their' narrative.

I once asked my late wife Mary ( Mary was an an artist and art teacher) about Hitler's art work and she told me that it was merely sterile buildings and streets -'Hitler could not present people. He's a hater.'

Stanley Crouch exposes Haters in a fine essay on the Hate-soaked creep who murdered a fine and heroic family man while trying to 'Kill Jews' at the Holocaust Museum last week -

Von Brunn was probably thrilled because the bombing took place on April 19, 1995, a day before Hitler's birthday. Der Führer was a hero to von Brunn, who thought that the Nazis had gotten a raw deal because of the Jewish-controlled media, which had to take its place on the bench containing all of the other Jewish conspiracies working to destroy Western Christian civilization by any means necessary.

You know how they do it or how it has been said that they do it. First, they do it through the root of evil - money. Then they move on to public education, entertainment, psychiatry, pornography, lecherous Jewish men and whorish Jewish women, misleading young people, Israel and whatever else they can make use of to beat down Western Christian civilization until it is ready for the slag heap that contains all good things permanently befouled by the Jews.

That's how a hard-shelled wing of people see Jews. Bigotry toward Jews transcends religion, class and race. Those who feel that Jews as a whole have to be held responsible for whatever is done by the most corrupt, opportunistic and malicious among them always agree on one thing that is essential to bigotry.
Click my post title for more from this wonderful man.


Stanley Crouch is a Man! 'Two men,' as my grandfather would say.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Sister Wendy Beckett: 'My real world is a world away from bustle"



My first experience with a nun occurred in the late 1950's at Little Flower Grammar School at 81st & Honore on the south side of Chicago. It was not a good one; similar experiences cascaded through my eight years at LFG.

My only ally, it seemed, - ( Hey, every one got clouted - except the snitches and they are now DNC Super Delegates) in my personal 'world's collide' with the Religious Sisters of Mercy was my County Kerry bog man Grandfather.

Unlike most, Hickeys, Old Lawrence understood. 'Pay them no mind, so, Páidín ( in Chicago phonetics, sounds like Pat-Sheen, translates to Paddy) , they're a shower of Hairy-faced Old Galway Bitches!'

Later in life, bumps, clouts, psychological warfare notwithstanding, I taught with some incredible women who 'took the veil.' The Sisters of Notre Dame - Helen Kavanaugh, Helen Larsen, Theresa Galvan, and the brilliant Madeline Lamarre. These girls could teach, filet a Kankakee River Channel Cat, work a beer glass like Bricklayer John McKenna and direct all of their actions to God.

I read a book about Sister Wendy Beckett, a South African born Sister of Notre Dame, Art critic, television star and contemplative. What struck me was Sister Wendy's attitude toward all things: 'everthing that happens in Life is a means to an end and I happen to believe that the end is God.' Sister then went on to compare the Rape of Lucretia by Tarquin to Cezanne's The Abduction - and wittily and smartly points to the nature of contempt for human beings intrinsic to the act of Rape.


Sister Wendy's life is spent in Caravan - in American, a trailer, a tornado target - at the bottom of a hill on which sits a Carmelite Contemplative Convent. As a contemplative, Sister Wendy has taken a vow of absolute silence and speaks only to the Superior of the Convent and rarely at that.

She talks a plenty - through her writing. Sister Wendy is a brilliant scholar and master of Art, who understands the nature of artistic expression and can explain the work of the World's Masters to this dumb as dirt know-it- all whose mouth goes like a duck's ass 24/7:


"Art is beauty and God is beauty. If you can get people to look at art; you are bringing them closer to Him, even if they don't know His name."

"My own definition of beauty is that which perpetually satisfies us. You look at it again and again and there is more of it to satisfy us. I would say that beauty is very much an attribute of God - He is essential beauty. But only those of us who have been fortunate enough to have faith know where beauty comes from. For the others, they are responding to beauty and responding to Him, though they mightn't be aware of that - they are responding to the pure, free, strong, loving spirit of God."
Sister Wendy

Got it in one take, Sister Wendy - and without a knuckle to the noggin. Thank You!

Click my post title for the TV series on Sister Wendy

Here is what Sister Wendy has been doing in the contemplative life -
Books

2001
Sister Wendy's Impressionist Masterpieces
Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces

2000
Sister Wendy's American Collection
In the Midst of Chaos, Peace (with Mary J. Dorcy and Dan Paulos)
Sister Wendy's Book of Muses (with Justin Pumfrey)

1999
Sister Wendy's 1,000 Masterpieces (with Patricia Wright)
My Favourite Things: 75 Works of Art from Around the World

1998
Sister Wendy's Nativity
Inner Life: A Fellow Traveler's Guide to Prayer (by David Torkington; foreword by Sister Wendy)
Sister Wendy's Odyssey: A Journey of Artistic Discovery
Sister Wendy's Book of Meditations
Sister Wendy's Book of Saints
The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art Through the Ages

1997
Sister Wendy's Story of Christmas: Adventures in Art
Sister Wendy in Conversation with Bill Moyers: The Complete Conversation (edited by Karen Johnson)
The Wisdom of the Apostles (compiled by Philip Law; introduction by Sister Wendy)
The Duke and the Peasant: Life in the Middle Ages (with Jean De Berry)
Max Beckmann and the Self

1996
Sister Wendy's Grand Tour: Discovering Europe's Great Art
Pains of Glass: The Story of the Passion from King's College Chapel, Cambridge (with George Pattison)

1995
Sister Wendy's Meditations: Meditations on Joy
Sister Wendy's Meditations: Meditations on Love
Sister Wendy's Meditations: Meditations on Peace
Sister Wendy's Meditations: Meditations on Silence
A Child's Book of Prayer in Art

1994
The Story of Painting
The Gaze of Love: Meditations on Art and Spiritual Transformation


Series

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2001
Sister Wendy's American Collection

1998
The Saints with Sister Wendy
The Much Loved Friend: Portrait of The National Gallery

1997
Sister Wendy in Conversation with Bill Moyers

1996
Sister Wendy's Grand Tour: Discovering Europe's Great Art
Sister Wendy: Pains of Glass
Sister Wendy's Story of Painting
Early Art
The Renaissance
Baroque to Romanticism
The Age of Revolution
Modernism